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It’s spring. Some lawns need fertilizer. Mine needs Clearasil.
From tree to budding tree, sidewalk to fence line, my lawn is as scarred, pocked and pitted as a teenager’s dermatological nightmare. Hundreds on hundreds of itty-bitty holes — no broader and deeper than a shot glass — give the backyard the look of a turf pegboard, with new ones crowding the old on a daily basis.
No doubt about it, the squirrels are back.
But then, I don’t think they ever left. Seems that sometime around Election Day, when the last nut has dropped from the tree, they settle in somewhere, wrap their tails around their noses and, save for a very occasional venture to fetch a few of the morsels squirreled away in September, they stay put until the sunnier days of springtime.
Well, those days came, the ground thawed and half the rafter rodents in the city converged on my backyard carrying on like so-many bushy-tailed buccaneers in search of buried treasure, excavating all manner of acorns, walnuts and the occasional semi-identifiable picnic tidbit.
I blame it on the old oak tree that shades my chaise lounge and keeps the bedroom cool. It’s an Old Country Buffet for Rocky and his family and friends. By mid-summer that old tree will be nothing but 50 feet of acorns, squirrel heaven right on earth. It’s great for the squirrels, but tough on the lawn.
Y’see, when it comes to greed, Donald Trump could learn something from a squirrel, and when it comes to parsimony, there’s no wad tighter than anyone of those arboreal varmints. There isn’t a squirrel in that tree that doesn’t want every last acorn for its very own.
Now there’s a limit to how many acorns a tree-dwelling critter can consume before becoming severely gravitationally challenged, so from summer to fall, if they’re not stuffing their cheek pouches, they busy themselves stashing whatever they can’t
chew.
Let me tell ya, when it comes to burying booty, Captain Hook had nothing on the common gray squirrel. In an instant he’ll hop out onto the lawn with an acorn half the size of his head clenched in his teeth, spot a likely tuft of turf, do a quick hawk, dog and cat check, and with a few deft digs, a poke and a pat, where I once had a bit of grass or a cheerful dandelion I have a bare spot of ground with a tooth-marked acorn underneath.
Of course, whatever the squirrel buries, the squirrel’s going to want to dig up again — usually after another bit of greenery has finally taken root.
Now this wouldn’t be such a problem if I was only dealing with a single treeful of squirrels. There’s a limit to how much earth even the most industrious family of rodents can turn in a given day, but we seem to have the misfortune of living at a major junction of some sort of squirrel superhighway system, and that old oak is a regular roof-rat Mall of America. I mean it, those varmints do some serious traveling to drop acorn crumbs and squirrel dung onto my beer and barbeque. I’ve got the regular resident oak tree squirrels to contend with and the residents of the interconnected branches of other two backyard trees — which would be squirrels enough for any man to deal with. But then there are the migrants, the immigrants, the transients and the passers-by. I’ve watched them dance their way down the block — scampering a roof ridge to a maple branch across a telephone wire to a porch roof across to a dormer to a downspout through flower bed to a rose bush onto a trash can to a mulberry and a telephone pole along the TV cable to where he can hop onto an overhanging branch to settle into an acorn dinner.
Odds are he’ll stash two or three under the sod on my boulevard before he hops back on the cable to head for home.
The mess he leaves for me to clean up.
Contact Jerome Christenson at jchristenson@winonadailynews.com or 453-3522.
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Move just out of town, but near the rail line wrote on Apr 27, 2007 9:39 PM: